We held our inaugural JMP User Forum for the North of England in the one of the most prestigious venues, the Sage Conference Centre. This wonderful building sits like a gleaming eye above the southern bank of the River Tyne, looking northward towards Newcastle's historic centre. And it was in this great venue that John Sall, co-founder of SAS and inventor of JMP, welcomed more than 50 JMP users. Such is the breadth of use of JMP that the audience included users from the agricultural products, banking, chemicals, consumer products goods, insurance, marketing services and pharmaceuticals industries.

In his keynote, John Sall talked about the importance of having a "flow experience" when performing analysis so that you can continue with your train of thought without being interrupted by processing delays. As computer processing power has increased, so has the ability to analyse and visualise larger data sets without pause. SAS leads the way in this respect, being able to handle huge data sets on the desktop with JMP and massive datasets with SAS, in the blink of an eye. John showed how JMP allows you to apply a broad range of different analytical techniques to data problems of different shapes and sizes. He also showed the power of JMP's instant visualisation to help you spot interesting patterns in your data.

In John's Q&A session, one user asked which of JMP's many capabilities John thought was especially good. He said that in his view, JMP's Design of Experiments platform is the golden star, as its creator, Brad Jones, is leading the way in which DOE is applied to complex problems in a resource-efficient way. It seemed appropriate for John to highlight DOE as several of the talks by JMP users illustrated the value that they get from DOE and the particular way it has been implemented in JMP.

Paul Davidson, who works in P&G's low-income markets for fabric and home care (i.e., laundry and detergent products), showcased how he uses JMP to design experiments and uses the Prediction Profiler to optimise product formulations. He also uses JMP for showing results to his management. This is a common requirement, so we will be holding a seminar at our HQ in Marlow on 24 October to show how JMP's visualisation capabilities can increase the speed and effectiveness of business decisions. Join us, if you'd like.

Fiona Baines, a statistician responsible for helping scientists carrying out research and development of hair products at Unilever, showed the add-in application that she developed to quickly and easily compile lab data. This add-in enables scientists to reduce time spent on data manipulation from half a day to a few seconds (yes, a few seconds!). It also adds rigour to the data processing and ensures that the scientists apply the correct analysis to their data. This is important as it allows Unilever to make valid claims about their products.

Phil Kay, the leading chemist at Fujifilm Image Colorants, showed how they use JMP to ensure that all their processes have the necessary capability to ensure that their inkjet products satisfactorily meet all customer specifications.

Claire Crawford, who is one of the leading synthetic chemists at GSK working in the field of optimising chemical process to enable the manufacture of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, showed how she is using JMP Pro's PCA and PLS platform to optimise the design and selection of these chemicals compounds.

Jeff Perkinson, JMP's Customer Care Manager, commented that the level of presentation was world-class and that all of them would have made good papers at the Discovery Summit held in the US each year. The Discovery Summit showcases how people working at the leading edge of science and engineering can use JMP to learn more from their data.